Windmills and Ferries
We spent an enjoyable day meandering down the Waal, after viewing the Water Line and the castle at Loevenstein. We crossed it three times on an assortment of ferries.
Ferry Across The Waal
The ferries were of a similar design to those that you get in London at Woolwich. But those are free, as opposed to the Dutch ones which were a couple of euros. I don’t think I’ve ever used three ferries in one day! But here in the heart of Holland, you can do it a lot more than that!
We finally ended up at Kinderdijk, which is a World Heritage Site. If you see pictures of windmills on a Dutch tourist poster, it is usually a picture from this area.
Kinderdijk
Close by the windmills are some of the largest Archemedean screw pumps, I’ve ever seen.
Archemedean Screw Pump at Kinderdijk
This is just one of four sets of these enormous pumps.
The Waal is not the sort of place that tourists would normally go. But they should!
Roaming the Netherlands
In July, I wandered around the Netherlands.
I learned a little bit about the Water Line and some of the fortifications are shown in the pictures. There are also pictures of the famous installations at Kinderdijk-Elshout.
Both are Dutch World Heritage Sites, although the Water Line is only on the tentative list.
World Heritage Sites in the UK
Pontcysyllte is the latest UK World Heritage Site and brings the total to 28. The government web site doesn’t include this latest one, but gives a list of all.
I’ve visited about half and would like to visit all.
But one is St. Kilda, so I doubt I’ll get there!
My favourite is Liverpool, as I went to University there and met my wife in the city.
St. Georges Hall, Liverpool
Pompeii
On the trip in June this year, I also visited Pompeii.
Pompeii is south of Naples and is just a few stops on the Circumvesuviana railway.
Pompeii is one of those places, that must be seen. It is a World Heritage Site.
The Aeolian Islands
These pictures were taken to, from and at the Aeolian Islands.
Everybody should go to these islands at least once. I’ve been twice, firstly in June 2007 and then again in the same month this year.
Each island has their own character; Panarea is small and swish, Salina is more agricultural, Stromboli is dominated by the volcano and Lipari is a bustling town as befits the capital.
Getting there though means a four hour trip in a hydrofoil!
Like Naples, the Aeolian Islands are a World Heritage Site.
Naples
It was then north to Naples.
I love Naples, despite getting mugged in the city on this trip. On a previous trip, I described it as a glorious dump.
Naples is a dump. A glorious dump!
It’s as though everybody has sent their leftovers and rubbish to the city. I know they are still going through the end of a dustmen’s strike or something like that, but there are full bins and rubbish beside them everywhere.
Take the transport system, which actually works extremely well. They have standard buses, bendy buses, electric buses, trolley buses, trams, underground trains, surface commuter trains and funiculars.
I can’t think of anything else that they might want, except for boats. But then they do have ferries to Sorrento, the Amalfi Coast, Capri and other islands, as well as much further afield.
So the city is a transport enthusiast’s delight.
They are also building a new SudMetro to close a gap in the system. According to the signs they started in 2001 and aim to finish in 2012. That makes CrossRail in London look speedy.
I’ve said that signage and maps are good, but not always.
I wanted to get on the trains at Dante, which is one of the central stations. I thought the station might be the one I wanted, but all it had was a large M. Only when I got on the train was I sure I’d got the right station.
But it all adds to life’s rich pattern.
Now I said Naples was a glorious dump, but it still has all of the good Italian shops and an awful lot of little ones with a Neapolitan slant and they are all such a contrast to get inside compared to the chaos outside.
But I like the city.
If I ever wanted to learn Italian properly and perhaps combine that with the cooking course I need, then I’d do it in Naples. It would probably be Italian with a harder edge.
This reminds me that perhaps when I was 18 or 19, I was hitching home to Felixstowe from London and got a lift from an sergeant in the Royal Corps of Transport, who was helping to run the TA in Ipswich. His previous posting had been in Marseilles Docks, where an officer, a sergeant and a few squaddies, helped to unload and chaperone the British Troops who used to exercise on the Lodève plateau.
As befits the Army, they’d sent him on a basic course in French, but he’d really learnt the language in the hardest docks in France. With his large size, powerful build and close cropped hair, he was not a man with whom you would pick an argument.
One day he shared the driving with the officer to Paris for a meeting with the French Ministry of Defence. His appearance and his French meant that when he asked in a bar for a drink, the owner thought the Marseilles version of the Mafia had come to collect their money.
Let’s say that it all ended well.
Note the picture of the sign at the Stazione Toledo.
I also wrote this about the backstreets of Naples.
Was it Peter Sarstedt, who wrote the Backstreets of Naples, with the line, “Where did you go to my lovely?”? (Should that sentence have a double question mark? My father would have known.)
I’d been singing the song and asking that question of myself and about my late wife, as I’d been meandering through those backstreets, in what is one of the most fascinating cities in Europe.
The streets may be dirty, graffiti-strewn, covered in rubbish and blighted by parked cars, but they are alive.
And at the moment that is important to me.
You can call me boring, but I’ve just seen three working Heidelbergs, including two at once! So now we know what happens to them! One I suspect was even older than me!
But the shops are more interesting in a way than Florence or Venice as they sell different things that may or may not be aimed at tourists like me. I have bought a few little presents of paper and clips that I thought simple and sweet. They also fit into my limited luggage space!
In the middle of it all is the Duomo, which is magnificent in a light marble, with all of the usual art and total excess. But why oh why, do they have electric candles where you put money in a slot and a light goes on? Now that is really tacky and not worthy of the rest of the cathedral.
But I also bought a cappuccino for a euro in a little cafe in those back streets. It was delicious.
Naples is a World Heritage Site.
Venice
After Milan I travelled on to Venice.
I’ve been to Venice many times, including once at New Year and another time to give a software demonstration at Verona. The latter ended in my giving someone a tour of Venice in the dark. As he had left before first light in the morning, I suspect he’s one of the few people to have seen the city, but not in the light.
Venice to me though was the starting point of my life after the death of my late wife. Not this trip, as this was the second since she died.
This is what I wrote in March 2008 under the title, Friends in Funny Places.
It was probably in about 1975 and I’d perhaps had a bit too much to drink and I was getting a bit Bolshi. I couldn’t have been that bad though, as I remembered the tale and especially the bit about a lady from that city who called herself a Baltimoron. Her words not mine. This American was going on about how they had won the Second World War and if there’s anything that gets my goat it’s that. I can be a bit of a patriot, but I’m much more of a seeker after the truth. We didn’t win it alone, but the war was won on a collective effort, where a large number of countries, races and creeds all played their part.
My premise was that the war was effectively won by the Battle of Britain.
Does anybody other than me remember the French documentary on that battle, made perhaps for the 25th anniversary in 1965, where the French said we were selfish to call it the Battle of Britain? They believed it should have been called the Battle of Europe, as if the RAF and their ragbag collection of gallant aerial knights had lost, then everything would have been over for the continent.
So by winning the Battle of Britain, we held the line long enough for Hitler to make his fatal mistake of attacking Russia and for the Japanese to bring America into the war at Pearl Harbor.
My father, who had been some sort of advisor to Lord Beaverbrook in the War, had also told me that if we’d lost then the Americans would have washed their hands of Britain.
But in that bar in Baltimore, it was a forlorn argument against four or five Americans and I wasn’t doing well, although I can usually keep my end up in that sort of contest.
And then there was the dramatic intervention, by an elderly man at the end of the bar!
He looked very much like Colonel Sanders, with the certain sort of bearing that senior officers in the armed services often have. (They also clean their shoes better, than us riff-raff!) He introduced himself as a man, who had worked with Franklin Roosevelt before and in the early years of the Second World War.
He just said that the Englishman is right and wished us all a good night.
I slept well and from that day on a lonely trip turned into a very happy one.
Now that night in Venice, I was cold, but thankfully not wet, and missing my late wife terribly as I walked the streets. I was however looking forward to dinner in a fish restaurant by the Rialto Bridge.
The Ostaria Antico Dolo was small with perhaps ten tables and lots of pictures of the owner, his father and grandfather on the walls. You know the type of restaurant.
As I sat down to drink a complimentary glass of prosecco, the familiar tones of John Lennon’s harmonica quietly filled the room. It was Love Me Do. I thought for a moment, perhaps shed a small tear and then smiled. One by one the tunes came through in droves; She Loves You, Eleanor Rigby, I Want To Hold Your Hand…
They knew I was a celiachia and I had carpaccio of Saint Pietro followed by some exquisite tuna. The waitress asked if I was OK with the music after I had told her the story seeing the Beatles in 1964 at Hammersmith, meeting my wife in Liverpool in 1968 and her death a few months ago. I said yes and more songs followed.
Included was We Can Work It Out and it may sound trite, but I must.
Perhaps about ten, I’d finished the meal and was expecting to go, but somehow I got invited by the waitress and her friends from University to talk and share a few drinks.
I shall always be grateful to those four students, as we talked through the problems of the world and tried to put things to rights. I’m too old to have much effect now, but they just might.
Just like I smile when I think of Baltimore, I shall now always remember those students in that restaurant in Venice.
Venice will always be where I go, when I am in trouble.
Venice is a World Heritage Site.
Churches in Old Goa
I’m putting up some of the pictures of my holidays in the last few years.
These are the churches in Old Goa.
It is a World Heritage Site and well worth visiting.
The Anonymous Widower 